Take one look at the HP Envy 13 and you’ll agree with us – it looks a lot like the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Both systems have the profile of the Ultra Thin style notebook – slim and sexy finish, cool to the touch operation, and longer battery life. HP’s Envy 13 has a better display (1,600×900-pixel resolution), newer CPU, and a wide variety of more options. The Macbook Pro costs  $1,199 and the HP Envy 13 is $1,799…is shelling out the additional $500 for the Envy worth it?The simple answer is yes if you can accord the better features. The Envy 13′s CPU sips power giving the laptop a reasonable 3 and a half hour battery life. You can buy a additional slice battery which allows a titantic 10 hour battery life. The screen is beautiful, the system zippy, and keyboard usable. The only negative is the below average track pad. See the HP Envy at HP’s Home & Home Office Store

Review Summaries
CNET says the HP Envy 13 is an excellent choice if price is no object. It’s a great mix of power and portability, and is sure to  attract curious stares in coffee shops and airport lounges. The Envy 13 has an aluminum body with a magnesium base, is reasonably slim, and has a nice contrasting design. The with 3 and half hour battery the Envy weights 4.8 pounds; adding the 10 hour battery makes the system positively bricklike at 5.2 pounds.

CNET calls the system interior is sparse, with a sunken keyboard made up of widely spaced, flat-topped keys and a single power button. There are no quick-launch or media control keys, but the row of Function keys now has their media control and other attributes as their primary mapping, with the actual F4, F5, and so on, tasks requiring you to hold down the Fn key at the same time. Vital keys such they noted was small up and down arrow keys. The keys have a solid feel and a pleasant matte finish that made them comfortable to use. The Envy 13 doesn’t have a backlit keyboard which is quickly becoming a standard feature on newer laptops.

Engadget loves the HP Envy 13′s stunning screen. It’s very bright, and the colors are just ultra-rich.  The 1600 x 900 seems like a near ideal resolution for a 13-inch screen. The viewer gets significantly more information than a regular WXGA resolution at this size, but no real eye strain at the pixel density. The glare is annoying, however. Things are fine when your sitting far away from daylight windows, but overhead fluorescents are provide a significant enough glare to be a bother. Sure, there are plenty of other computers that are just this bad, but that doesn’t make it right. There’s also auto-dimming of the display when on battery, which can’t be easily overcome with the brightness keys, a slight annoyance.

The Envy 13 has one major downfall – the subpar touch pad. Crunchgear says your friends won’t “envy” this touch pad. It has two buttons, one on either bottom corner, and a central finger sliding area. It also supports limited gestures including two-fingered scroll but to activate them you need to tap the touch pad. Botton-scrolling is nigh on impossible because your thumb starts to touch the upper touchpad and results in all sorts of scrolling mess. The touch pad is also very large and very sensitive, resulting in missed tracking every few swipes. It’s obvious that HP hasn’t quite perfected the touch pad – perhaps they will shortly come out with firmware which resolves the issue.

This Gizmodo review indicates that the Envy 13′s Intel Core 2 Duo Processor (along with 3GB of RAM) doesn’t quite have as much as power as the MacBook Pro’s 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, but it still keeps up with everyday tasks. When running Firefox with over 10 tabs open, iTunes and TweetDeck the system showed no performance hit.

When adding in playback of No Country For Old Men on Blu-ray (a $250 external Blu-ray optical drive is available) the system seemed to hold up thanks to the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics card. Instead of weaker, integrated graphics, like the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s Nvidia GeForce 9400M, the Envy is outfitted with the discrete ATI GPU. The proof is in the benchmarks: Not only did the Radeon HD 4330 beat out the 9400M on 3DMark06, but it notched better frame rates in Crysis. At higher resolutions the Envy should get about 30 fps, and the MacBook 22.8. On the Envy, you can also turn the discrete graphics off and switch the integrated Intel offering without having to shut down the system to save battery life.

The Envy 13 comes with a 4-cell battery (yes, it is swappable) which ran for about three and a half hours during everyday usage (running Firefox, Pidgin, TweetDeck and streaming music on Playlist.com). The extra 6-cell battery slice (that magnetically clips to the bottom of the notebook) will add about another 10 hours of runtime.

Video Review

Price Roundup
The HP Envy 13 is priced $1,799. See it at the HP Home & Home Office Store

HP ENVY 13 Customizable Notebook PCBuy this configuration now or customize and price your own HP ENVY 13 Customizable Notebook PC — direct from Hewlett-Packard.

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